Post by disgustedorite on Jun 29, 2020 4:57:03 GMT
Edit: I'm expanding this to be about the old Sagan 4 forum (2007-2017) as a whole, as everything I'm trying to find is directly connected to it.
This is a bit more obscure than some of the other things here, so I apologize. For a bit of context/background, the original version of Sagan 4 is a web project and the second oldest known collaborative speculative evolution project on the internet, and for a few years it itself was lost media. While all content canon to Sagan 4 was eventually recovered (wiki linked), the original forum and therefore tons of valuable discussion about the canon and nearly all of the rejected and otherwise non-canon content is still lost because the original website was shut down and everyone who is known to have downloaded the backup seems to have lost it.
I've already tried using the wayback machine on the original Sagan 4 website, but while I did find some content, nearly everything is gone, including old submission threads and the like. I'm personally interested in finding non-canon sapient species, since they're especially rare and novel; one rejected sapient, Chimpus, was saved apparently because of how infamously bad it was, but non-winning entries of the original sapient contest (Firestarter and an unknown descendant of one of the 2-trunked elephant plents), a rejected sapient Azelemur called an "Azelangur", and (at least the description of) a retracted sapient that was basically the Tripodician with clothes, along with possibly many others scattered over the years, are lost. (Edit: Since I first made this post, the artwork of the Firestarter and the Azelangur were recovered. The rest is still missing, however.)
Is there anyone who might be able to help find this missing data?